No soil test, no plant list
We’ll sketch a direction from photos if you’re curious, but we won’t put a species list on paper without lab numbers. It’s the one rule that keeps your money out of the compost bin.
About · The desk behind the dirt
A folding table by the window, six soil jars lined up like a choir, and a Brooklyn rainstorm drumming on the fire escape.
That’s the office. Raven Loam is a small native-plant and soil-health studio, and we do one thing: turn your soil test and a handful of phone photos into a plan you can actually build on a Saturday.
We never visit your yard. We don’t sell plants, either, so nobody here is nudging you toward the pricey ones. You get a planting plan, an amendment spec and a plant list, and an invoice. That’s the whole deal.
How we got here
It started with a stoop box that kept dying.
Three summers, three rounds of pretty nursery plants, three funerals. Then someone finally mailed a jar of that dirt to a lab. Compacted, alkaline, and basically a brick with opinions.
Fix the soil, pick plants that already like Brooklyn, and the box got boring in the best way: it just worked. We figured everybody with a yard, a tree pit or a fire escape deserves that answer without paying for a site visit.
01
The dead stoop box
Nursery plants, bagged potting mix, zero data. Nothing lived past August.
02
The first lab report
pH, organic matter, texture, a lead screen. Suddenly the problem had numbers.
03
Natives, measured
Compost in inches, sulfur per 100 square feet, plants spaced to the inch.
04
The desk goes remote
Neighbors started sending photos and soil tests by email. We kept the folding table.
House rules, stamped
Four things we won’t bend on, even when it’s a rainy Friday
Think of these as the stamps on every plan we send out.
Natives that evolved on this coastal plain
Little bluestem, New England aster, swamp milkweed, wild geranium. Plants that shrug off salt, heat and our weird clay-to-sand patchwork.
Amend less, measure more
“Add compost” isn’t a spec. We say how many inches, and when the answer is “skip the fertilizer, natives like it lean,” we say that too.
If it needs a degree to read, we did it wrong
Counts, spacing in inches, install order, and what to do first when it rains Friday night. Plain English up top, Latin names in the margins for the nerds.
Working with the desk
What to expect from us, and what we’ll gently pass on
What lands in your inbox
- A tidy PDF with the amendment spec on page one
- Plant counts with spacing in inches and a bloom calendar
- Replies in plain, text-style English, usually inside a business day
- An invoice by email, per plan, from $168
What we’ll pass on
- Site visits and on-the-ground installation
- Selling you plants, mulch or a single bag of fertilizer
- Plant lists written without a lab report
- Subscriptions, maintenance contracts and upsell calls
Need a crew to dig it all in? We’ll happily say so up front instead of pretending we can.
Ready to start?
Got a jar of dirt? We’ve got a desk.
A Soil Read starts at $168, the Whole-Yard Plan is $612. Tell us about your yard and we’ll point you to the right one.
(934) 210-3421 · contact@ravenloam.com
Mon–Fri 8:30am–4:30pm · evenings by appointment